Sister Ko is in the service of Eunuch Li, she carries out various missions such assassinations. Her latest mission is to infiltrate and destroy a rebel martial arts group. Sister Ko sends Brother Sing to join another undercover operative within the group. Meanwhile Sister Ko prepares her own group to attack the rebel group.
Butterfly and Sword is a swordplay / fantasy kung fu movie, this movie is primarily high paced martial arts action. Set in a typical fantasy setting of ancient china most of the story is based on conflict between various martial arts groups. The story is a little confusing as there are some twists in the plots but the main trouble we had was being able to follow the dialog which left us a little lost from time to time.
With the all star cast such as Michelle Yeoh, Donny Yen and Tony Leung it was surprising to see the characters being somewhat uninteresting. This was pretty much the case for all of the characters, none of them seemed overly alive. Of course, not being able to fully follow the dialog helped make the characters seem less interesting but even then some elements would shine through. So character wise we saw nothing really impressive. Oh we must mentioned this, completely unrelated, there was a lot of silly hats in this movie.
What they missed in the movie they made up with action, there is a good deal of martial arts action during the movie. Some of the scene were very well thought out and pretty cool but the fights themselves were overly fast and filled with bad camera angles. In most of the fight scenes you miss a lot of actual martial arts moves due to the camera angles. It was more flash than actual content. On the positive side there was a lot of action so the movie did not get boring.
The subtitles ruined everything, they were clear but a long sentence would be on screen for a second while a single word for 30 seconds. We missed 50 percent of the dialog, especially the important story dialog. It's probably that aspect that ruined the movie the most. As for general thoughts this movie was really unimpressive, you can classify it in the lower grade of fantasy martial arts movie. It was not bad but it wasn't really good either, you should rent before you buy.
The image quality (LTB) was good with the exception of a couple of scratches or some scenes where the image seemed too dark. The sound was a decent Dolby Digital 5.1. The extra's include chapter selection and the official trailer. A decent release from Mei Ah but we heard there are two versions of this DVD, we do not know anything about the other version so you might want to do some research if you would want to buy this movie.